Video Games

How are we tracked once we press
play?

Surveillance and Video Games

Stephanie Vie and Jennifer deWinter

It seems a non sequitur to move from surveillance
and privacy into talking about video games; after all,
games are fun and engaging (Koster, 2004; deWinter,
2015a), they teach valuable literacies (Colby, Johnson, & Colby, 2013; Gee, 2007; Vie,
2008), and they
offer creative avenues and expressions for students and
faculty (Carbonaro et al., 2007; Wark, 2007). And with
what Jesper Juul (2009) has called the casual
revolution, people who never considered themselves
game players have logged hours on touchscreen devices
such as smart phones and tablets. How many of us, bored
in a waiting room, have pulled out our phones and
started crushing candy or finding the right word for
our Words with Friends? Games are commonplace;
they are part of our quotidian lives, and this is what
situates them as an ideal portal for surveillance and
data collection.

In our section of this webtext, we offer a quick
statistical and economic summary of who plays these
games, followed by a brief introduction to telemetric
data collection. We then turn to three patterns of
surveillance:

peer surveillance and virality,

corporate surveillance and game iteration, and

government surveillance of suspected
terrorist activities.

Game designers are taking note of these patterns of
surveillance, so toward the end of this section, we
discuss Jesse Schell's 2010 D.I.C.E. (Design, Innovate,
Communicate, Entertain) talk in which he imagines a
utopic world in which games make us better people. And
while we recognize that much of this is scary
doom-and-gloom stuff, we do want to end on a positive
note. Once rule systems are in place and surveillance
creates algorithms and databases, these systems can be
gamed; so we end on this more positive note of
resistance and agency within seemingly 1984-esque
systems. As Laura Gonzales and Dànielle Nicole
DeVoss articulate elsewhere in
this webtext, our aim is not to scare off individuals
from playing games—particularly given the
many benefits that game play can bring to our lives
such as increased motor and literacy skills, improved
spatial attention, pronounced mental flexibility, and
increased relaxation and joy.

Thus, our goal here is not to argue against games.
Indeed, both of us are avid game players; we research,
teach, design, and play video games. Instead, our goal
is to broaden conversations about surveillance and
privacy to consider games as technological agents
within an ideological system that isolates and then
rewards players for their good behavior and sharing
patterns.

Who plays these games?

Facebook estimates more than 1 million monthly
active users overall, and Facebook games are a major
force in convincing people to log into their pages and
spend time on the site. Millions of other gamers play
on mobile devices like tablets, iPads, and smart
phones. This graph from Statista shows U.S. summary
numbers from 2011–2014 with projected data to 2019.
Verified numbers for the US alone in 2014 is 146.6
million mobile phone gamers.

Number of U.S. mobile phone gamers

This is not just a U.S. phenomenon:
Global game revenues show that mobile gaming will
generate $30.3 billion worldwide, replacing console
gaming as the top earner at $26.4 billion (Gaudiosi,
2015). And that's just mobile games. Console and PC
gaming is increasingly played online, from MMORPGs like
World of Warcraft to exercise games like Wii
Fit. Within these frameworks, game designers and
hosting companies rely upon user telemetry, a process
that allows them to gather data on the behavior of
players. These can come from, but are not limited to,

• Game play

• Purchasing behaviors

• Physical movement

• Interaction and communication with
other users

• Interactions with other
applications.

Thus, while careful consideration has been given to
freemium games and microtransactions (Grimes, 2015;
Lescop & Lescop, 2014; Vie, 2014ab) and
even to addictive gambling design components within
these microtransactions (Gainsbury et
al., 2014; deWinter 2015b), less attention has been paid to the changes
in online culture because of surveillance and games.
These changes do not affect just those who study games;
they affect the ways that content hosting sites are
run, the ways in which people participate in online
communities, and even the types of data governments
have access to.

Going Viral, or the Surveillance of Peers

A number of games use social networks to increase
player numbers by giving rewards and options to players
only if they can bring a friend into the system.
However, none have arguably been as successful as
King's Candy Crush Saga. Candy Crush
depends on viral marketing within social networks to
increase its player base. For example, as the image
below illustrates, when played by a player connected to
Facebook, this game suggests automatic Facebook
updates, allows you to always see how your friends are
performing to drive competition, and encourages you to
ask friends for help when stuck on a level.

This method of managed virality is a successful
business strategy for many of these games, using
friends to advertise the information through these
simple status updates. Further, the scoreboard adheres
to many of the basic values of competition, showing
player scores juxtaposed to one another. In the image
above, the player in the first position holds the number one spot on level 260 of
Candy Crush with 418,840 points while
Stephanie doesn't even appear on the first screen of
the leaderboard given her score of 242,940 (placing her
#24 among her Facebook friends).

Socially networked games leverage networked
relationships to encourage new players to join the
system and current players to compete with friends in
the network. For example, Facebook's interface
showcases a games feed that points out, play by play,
what friends are accomplishing in the system. In the
image below, viewers see the Facebook game activity of
two of Stephanie's Facebook friends.
Showing which levels they've beaten, what their current
high scores in various games are, and even specific
moves that they've made in these games, the Facebook
games feed attempts to compel users to play and to
compete with others in their network. Users may forget
that Facebook will post automatically on their behalf
unless they change their privacy settings; the site
offers an anonymous game-play setting, which promises
to let you "try out select games without sharing
your Facebook info or letting games post to Facebook
for you," but this option is turned off by
default.

Within these socially networked games, competition
is monetized through the offering of in-game boosters
for a price ($0.99–$39.99) so that players can buy
their way to higher scores against friends and family
alike. While only about 30% of players of Candy
Crush spend money, with over a billion downloads,
this number is significant (Geron, 2013). In other
words, surveillance is driving multiple economic
sectors, which brings us to our next point.

From the Rules of the Game to the Rules of the
Player, or the Surveillance of Corporations

Using user telemetry, companies collect data on how
players play in order to adapt the game for player
experience. Further, these same companies track clicks,
offer advertisements, and sell this data to other
gaming and non-gaming companies. And in order to ensure
that the user base keeps returning, companies use
design strategies that compel players to take simple
actions for points and free things (a point that Jesse
Schell [2010] talks about as a positive force and which we
take up later in this section). Often, these actions
are tasks like watching advertisements or featured
content in order to receive points, free moves or
lives, in-game currency, or other digital valuables.
The mobile game Crossy Road, an easy-to-play
endless hopper game in the style of Frogger,
offers players in-game currency (coins) in exchange for
watching a number of videos advertising other games. At
the time this screen shot was taken, the video being
played promoted a new game, Paradise Bay, launched in
March 2015 by King (the makers of Candy Crush
Saga).

The exchange of our data for goods or services does
not have to be problematic, but it often is when we are
unaware that our data is being collected to begin
with—or when we are unaware, as Colleen A. Reilly
pointed out in her section of
this webtext, that our data is being shared with
third-party systems. As Estee N. Beck has
questioned, the "rhetoric of sharing, of online
networking, of connecting with others [has] led people
to participate in algorithmic surveillance... people
give up their data because of the perceived benefits of
the product or service. Why is that?" (as cited in
Lindgren, 2015). For many video games at least, the
game space is deliberately crafted to highlight the
fun, the excitement, the connectivity and to downplay
elements of surveillance and data gathering.

The design of these games is so imbricated in the
conditional levels of rhetoric that agency is either
disguised (the game is offering me something, not a
person designing the game) or disempowered (I didn't
know that clicking yes would open me up to a ton of
spam). Communication embeds
purpose—monetization—into algorithmic
systems of experience. The design and placement of the
terms of service and privacy policies for these games
is another area where agency is frequently disguised or
disempowered. Frequently difficult to find, difficult
to read, and difficult (if not impossible) to opt out
of, the terms of service and privacy policies in mobile
and socially networked games are another area where
critical literacies of the kind espoused throughout
this webtext (and throughout the conversations held in
the Town Hall itself) become crucially important.

War Games, or the Surveillance of Governments

That games are closely aligned to war is not a new
claim. They have been used to attract people to the
military (such as the game America's Army) and
to promote an ideology of war as heroic and good
(Huntemann & Payne, 2009). However, seemingly
disconnected games are now part of a larger war games
strategy. For example, Mark Mazzetti and Justin Elliott (2013)
found that the CIA, FBI, and Pentagon infiltrated
World of Warcraft and collected information on
Xbox Live. They wrote: "Fearing that terrorist or
criminal networks could use the games to communicate
secretly, move money or plot attacks, the documents
show, intelligence operatives have entered terrain
populated by digital avatars that include elves, gnomes
and supermodels." And this isn't new. Doug Gross (2013)
reported on a 2008 NSA memo that "called online
gaming a 'target-rich communications network' where
terrorists could communicate 'in plain sight'" (n.p.).

It's important to note here that, as games are
increasingly part of U.S. daily life, they become a
forum of civic space, of alternative fantasies, and of
safe play. Many of these networked games provide spaces
for people to get together and share common
experiences. Increasingly, they offer a touch point in
contemporary society as a cultural expression. As such,
the implications of government spying are tremendous.
Game theory often discusses the ways in which players
assume a safe space, a place where the rules and
consequences of a real world are suspended, whether
that space is a magic circle a la Johan Huizinga (1955) or a
protective psychological frame as proposed by Michael Apter
(1989) and taken up by Steven Conway (2014). Play is a stress
relief. It is less so if the government collects,
stores, and interprets our data unbeknownst to us. And
these rights extend to children playing on the
Internet—rights that should be protected under
the UN Right to Play. But legal cases have illustrated
that game developers have failed to respect such rights
in the past. A 2014 class action suit brought against
game developer Zynga and Facebook claimed that users'
identities and activities in Facebook games were
disclosed to third parties without their consent; a
2012 suit settled against Playdom, Inc., fined the
company $3 million after Playdom collected and
disclosed personal information from hundreds of
thousands of children under age 13 without parental
consent (Vie, 2016, pp. 64–65).

Dystopian Future Presented as Utopian Future

What does it matter that games and play are
surveilled? After all, almost everything that we do in
contemporary society is watched and recorded, to how
many steps we take in a day (thank you, iPhone and
Fitbit) to what programs we like on Netflix. The
problem is that surveillance can be used to create
better games, better reward structures, better dopamine
hits, and better consumer habits in us. Don't believe
us? Watch this video of Jesse Schell's 2010 D.I.C.E.
talk "Design Outside the Box":

Jesse Schell was an imagineer for Disney before
becoming a game design professor at Carnegie Mellon University,
and his work is excellent. This move to use games to
fix the world, make people better, more happy, and
healthier is not new. It comes from a contemporary
fixation popularized by scholars such as Jane McGonigal
(2011) and Ian Bogost (2011). What becomes eerily clear
in these presentations, however, is the acceptance and
use of game surveillance to change the human practices
and cultures through technological means. What is being
imagined is a system of constant distraction and
external rewards—an almost perfectly realized
culture industry. If only Adorno and Horkeimer knew
about games and user telemetry.

Where is the Agency? Gaming the Masters of the
Game

Gaming is not just something that hides an ideology
of surveillance; gaming itself is an ideology. It
shapes how we think of the world, affects our actions
and opinions. So many people gamify activities that are
not necessarily games, such as sales competitions,
publication numbers, and even jogging times. What this
means is that people can master the game. And if there
is no game, people can use the points, numbers, rules,
and affordances to imagine the game, and then master
that game.

Take, for example, airline rewards points. Thanks to
deregulation, airlines were able to come up with
mechanism to reward fliers with points, frequent flier
miles, and credit card offers. And for those who want
to play, there are ways to always fly free in first
class with all of the affordances available to them
through these complex systems. Consider this story from
Ben Wofford (2015) at Rolling Stone. Wofford focused on Ben
Schlappig, a master travel hacker, writing:

Schlappig owes his small slice of fame to his blog
"One Mile at a Time," a diary of a young man living
the life of the world's most implausible airline
ad. Posting as often as six times a day, he metes
out meticulous counsel on the art of travel
hacking—known in this world as the Hobby.
It's not simply how-to tips that draw his fans,
it's the vicarious thrill of Schlappig's
nonstop-luxury life—one recent flight with a
personal shower and butler service, or the time
Schlappig was chauffeured across a tarmac in a
Porsche. But his fans aren't just travel
readers—they're gamers, and Schlappig is
teaching them how to win.

And this idea of winning the game against the
corporate bad guy permeates this text and the community
that it represents. To succeed in these communities is
to win, providing people a points system, win
conditions, lose conditions, and narrative structure by
repurposes the points and structures created through
constant surveillance.

It is precisely the issue of agency that most
intrigues us about the intersection of games and
surveillance. Games offer multiple levels of inquiry
into agency. From the beginning moments when a game is
designed and developed, rhetorical awareness comes into
play. Who will buy this game? Who will play this game?
When and where will they play it, and why? And how long
will it manage to capture their attention before they
move on to another one? These questions seem easy
enough to parse, and common enough for game designers
who are interested in effective marketing.

It is the more difficult questions that interest us
more, the questions that are trickier to answer because
they involve greater numbers of stakeholders and
incorporate legal statutes and ethical principles. For
example, what kinds of data will be collected about
players and when? How (or even will) players be
notified about the personal data and game play data
being collected from them? In what ways can players opt
out of data collection yet still play the game? Will
players have opportunities to help shape policy
decisions about personal data collection, to provide
feedback on the composition and placement of terms of
service and privacy policies? Will they be effectively
notified when their data is shared with third parties
and will they be able to negotiate the sharing of that
data in ways that are nuanced, not just binary options
like yes or no?

What our conversations at the 2015 Computers &
Writing Town Hall have illustrated is that our field is
aware of and passionate about user agency with regard
to privacy, surveillance, and data collection. From
guiding students to think through the ways that
data collection is rendered
invisible, to considering the importance of a
conceptual shift from assessing students as merely
consumers to data
producers and users, to thinking through position
statements for writing program
administrators concerned about the technologies of
writing that surround us, the Town Hall showcased a
lively conversation about these issues and more.
Because they are fun, games are sometimes considered
frivolous. To say that one has been playing games
sounds less like work and serious business and more
like, well... play. But games, as we have argued
elsewhere (deWinter & Vie, 2015), are serious business.
And as such, we argue that we should continue
interrogating these important questions related to
privacy, to personal data, to corporate surveillance,
and to player agency in games. As rhetoricians and game
players—and that is indeed what many of us are,
whether we play Candy Crush, Final
Fantasy, or simply Solitaire—we are
well positioned to continue these conversations in ways
that may make meaningful change in an activity that
millions of us engage in every day.